I’ve got a total of about 2 hours with sketchup and there is a good chance that by the time someone replies… I might have already figured out the answer to my question, but here goes. Might save me some time.

Here is the room I have drawn…

I drew it by drawing 4 rectangles for the top/sides/bottom. For the back I used the pencil tool to draw the polygon. Now I need to add doors then I can “go inside” and start adding 2x4’s and whatnot for the loft.

I’m looking for advice. Would It have been smarter to draw the polygon “face-on” and then use guides to make it 4 inches thick,then use the push pull tool to “pull” the room to the proper length? Am I some how shooting myself in the foot by having “2d” walls ?

Chances are good that I will get rid of the ceiling and the wall where we’re not building anything. But at the same time they might be handy for ceiling fan placement/bed interference.

Generally, when you’re creating a linear shape with a constant cross-section–an extrusion–you would draw the profile and then Push/Pull to depth. Still, though, there are always situations when you may want or need to draw the edges in one at a time with the Line tool, particularly if the final shape has additional features.

Building a structure with a detailed interior is a much different story. As you correctly surmised, getting the walls square and parallel is the overriding consideration here, and for this reason you generally start such a model with a floor plan, Push/Pull it to height, and build a roof over that. The shed roof isn’t that much of a problem: you can use a big rectangle and the Intersect Faces command to slice through the walls at the appropriate angle for the pitch of the ceiling and roof.

You can make the roof a group and place it on a layer, whose visibility you can toggle off and on, to gain access to the interior spaces. You can do the same for one or more walls if you need to, depending on the complexity of the structure and your personal preferences. There are several strategies for working on interiors, including layer visibility, section planes, and simply panning sideways through a wall. It’s also a good idea to save one or more scenes inside, so you can get there quickly.

You know, you could build the loft outside the structure and move it inside when it’s done, something you probably couldn’t get away with in real life.

One of the beautiful aspects of using SketchUp is that you can find many ways to achieve a specific form. There hardly ever is only one workable method. Different users will apply various approaches to develop models of similar structure.

That being said, it may be more effective to construct your model so that the representative thickness of walls, floors and ceilings are shown. If I were developing your example, it would be approached in the following sequence:

Model the total floor area using the rectangle tool.

Select the floor area (face) and offset by the the wall thickness.

Push Pull (the exterior walls just created) to the appropriate height.

Use the line tool to indicate the height of the wall at the uppermost elevation and connect that point to the top of the lower wall on the other side of the room. Finish creating the top surface using the line tool.
5a. Either Offset the top surface or …
5b. Or you can push pull the top surface the desired thickness (distance).

Position your doors and windows on the wall surfaces and push pull through the wall.